Serena Grandi | Through the Shattered Lens

(Lisa recently discovered that she only has about 8 hours of space left on her DVR! It turns out that she’s been recording movies from July and she just hasn’t gotten around to watching and reviewing them yet. So, once again, Lisa is cleaning out her DVR! She is going to try to watch and review 52 movies by the end of Tuesday, December 6th! Will she make it? Keep checking the site to find out!)

On November 10th, I recorded 1985’s The Adventures of Hercules off of the Encore Family channel.

Let’s see if I can explain exactly what this film is about. Bear with me because this is going to be a strange one. For that matter, you might also want to bare with me because The Adventures of Hercules is all about displaying the physique of body builder Lou Ferrigno. Ferrigno plays the legendary Greek demigod Hercules. Or I should say that he provides Hercules’s body and occasionally a facial expression or two. Since The Legend of Hercules was an Italian film, the entire cast is obviously and frequently awkwardly dubbed. That includes Ferrigno. Though Hercules doesn’t say much, when he does speak, he does so in a voice that really doesn’t go with his body, his personality, or anything that seems to be happening on screen.

Anyway, I guess I should try to explain the plot. I should mention that The Legend of Hercules is a sequel to another Hercules film. I haven’t seen the first Hercules film. Maybe the Legend of Hercules would have made more sense if I had, though I somehow doubt it.

Basically, bad things are happening on Earth. Why? Well, it appears that four of the Gods have gotten together and stolen Zeus’s 7 Mighty Thunderbolts. They’ve hidden the Thunderbolts across the planet, entrusting them with various monsters. As a result of Zeus no longer having his thunderbolts, the Moon is now on the verge of colliding with Earth and human sacrifices are also being committed to a monster that looks a lot like the ID Monster from Forbidden Planet.

What does a Mighty Thunderbolt look like? Here you go.

Two sisters, Urania (Milly Carlucci) and Glaucia (Sonia Vivani), appeal to Zeus for help but, of course, Zeus is powerless without his thunderbolts. However, he can still sends his son Hercules (Lou Ferrigno) to Earth. Working with the sisters, Hercules goes on a quest for the thunderbolts. This basically amounts to a series of scenes in which Hercules battles various people in rubber suits. Whenever Hercules throws a punch, he’s filmed so that appears that he’s punching the camera. Whenever Hercules’s fist makes contact, there’s a flash of red. Whenever anyone is knocked off their feet by Hercules, they flip around in slow motion. This happens every ten minutes or so.

Now, I don’t want to spoil the movie but I simply have to tell you about this. There is a scene, towards the end of the film, in which Hercules literally grabs hold of the Moon and prevents it from crashing into the Earth.

Anyway, the plot makes no sense and that’s a huge part of this film’s enthusiastic, if frequently inept, charm. As directed by the famed Italian director, Luigi Cozzi, The Adventures of Hercules has this cobbled together feeling to it that is undeniably likable. Much as with Cozzi’s best-known film, Starcrash, The Adventures of Hercules is a film that wins you over by pure determination. Cozzi set out to make a mythological epic and he wasn’t going to let something like a complete lack of budget stop him.

How strange an experience is The Adventures of Hercules? Check out some of these randomly assembled screen shots:

The other fun thing about The Adventures of Hercules is that, since this was a Luigi Cozzi film, the cast is full of Italian exploitation vets, the majority of whom were best known for appearing in far less family-friendly fare.

Here’s just a few of the performers you’ll find in The Adventures of Hercules:

Sonia Vivani, who plays Glaucia, also played the doomed sculptor in Umberto Lenzi’s infamous Nightmare City.

William Berger, who plays the villainous King Minos, appeared in several classic Spaghetti westerns, including Sabata. Sadly, his promising career was cut short when he was framed for drug possession and spent several years in an Italian prison. When he was finally freed, he ended up doing movies like The Adventures of Hercules.

Zeus was played by Claudio Cassinelli, an acclaimed actor who appeared in several giallo films. He also co-starred in 1978’s infamous Mountain of the Cannibal God.

The evil High Priest was played by Venantino Venantini whose credits include everything from The Agony and the Ecstasy to Lucio Fulci’s City of the Living Dead to Umberto Lenzi’s Cannibal Ferox.

Aphrodite is played by Margit Newton, who somewhat infamously starred in what is generally considered to be the worst zombie film of all time, Hell of the Living Dead.

Serena Grandi played Euryale (a.k.a. Medusa). Grandi is probably most remembered for his grotesque death scene in Antropophagus. She was also the star of one of my personal guilty pleasures, Lamberto Bava’s Delirium.

And finally, the mad scientist Dedalos was played by Eva Robbins, who achieved immortality by playing the Girl on the Beach in Dario Argento’s Tenebrae.

The Adventures of Hercules might not be “technically” a good film but it’s definitely (and rather compulsively) watchable.

“I warn you, the hate of a woman can be very bad!”

— Dialogue from Delirium (1987

The 1987 Italian film Delirium is an odd combination of soapy melodrama and giallo horror. Someone is murdering models and taking pictures of their corpses. Some other people are plotting to take over a magazine. Obscene phone calls are received. Recorded taunts are heard. Oh, and one unlucky model is attacked by a swarm of bees.

That’s right — Delirium is the first and probably the only giallo to feature bees used as a deadly weapon.

Gioia (Serena Grande) is a former prostitute-turned-model-turned-men’s-magazine-publisher. When we first meet Gioia, she’s sitting out at her pool and watching a photo shoot. Her neighbor — a teenage boy who is confined to a wheel chair — calls her.

“You make my member hard with desire!” he tells her, “It wants to penetrate your flower and explode!”

Gioia calmly tells him to stop bothering her and then hangs up on him. And really, this scene pretty much establishes everything that we need to know about Gioia. She is a successful businesswoman who is just as comfortable dealing with the pervert next door as she is making high power deals. You think Donald Trump’s ruthless? Well, he’s got nothing on Gioia!

The other thing that you notice about Gioia is that she has an extremely voluptuous figure. There’s not a single scene that isn’t shot to emphasize that fact and yet, the unapologetic pride that Gioia (and actress Serena Grande) took in her body was actually very empowering and one of the better aspects of the film. Far too often, movies associate being busty with either being stupid or slutty and women are told that they have to hide their figure to be taken seriously. (Traditionally, in horror films, it seems like the bigger an actress’s cup size, the less likely she is to survive until the end of the film.) Speaking as someone who shares Gioia’s struggle, I was happy to see a woman with big boobs being portrayed as both an intelligent businesswoman and a tough, strong survivor.

Gioia has more than just the pervert next door to deal with. There’s also the fact that her models are being murdered and she’s receiving photos of their dead bodies in the mail. Who is killing Gioia’s employees? Could it be a rival publisher (played by Capucine)? Could it be Gioia’s neurotic assistant (played by Daria Nicolodi)? Could it be George Eastman, who plays Gioia’s former lover? Actually, it’s made pretty clear that it’s not George Eastman, which is odd when you consider how many movies have featured Eastman as a killer. (Eastman and Grandi also co-starred in the infamous cannibal epic Anthropophagus, in which Eastman was the killer and Grandi was the center of one of the most infamous scenes in the history of Italian horror.) Or could the killer by the pervert next door?

As is typical of films in the giallo genre, most of the murders are filmed from the killer’s point of view. What’s interesting is that, when the killer looks at his victims, he literally sees them as twisted monsters. It’s a neat little technique that leads to scenes like this:

Delirium was directed by Lamberto Bava, who has never quite gotten the attention that he deserves. Despite the fact that he directed such classics as the two Demons films and A Blade In the Dark, I’ve always felt that Lamberto is often overshadowed by the achievements of his father, Mario Bava. However, Lamberto Bava’s films are almost always entertaining when taken on their own terms. Delirium may not reach the heights of A Blade In The Dark or even Demons but it’s still an entertaining giallo. It’s perhaps not the film to use to introduce a newcomer to the genre but, those of us who are familiar with giallo, Delirium is an enjoyably crazed offering.